A hybrid thin-client protocol for multimedia streaming and interactive gaming applications

  • Authors:

  • D. De Winter;P. Simoens;L. Deboosere;F. De Turck;J. Moreau;B. Dhoedt;P. Demeester

  • Affiliations:

  • Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Gent, Belgium;Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Despite the growing popularity and advantages of thin-client systems, they still have some important shortcomings. Current thin-client systems are ideally suited to be used with classic office-applications but as soon as multimedia and 3D gaming applications are used they require a large amount of bandwidth and processing power. Furthermore, most of these applications heavily rely on the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). Due to the architectural design of thin-client systems, they cannot profit from the GPU resulting in slow performance and bad image quality. In this paper, we propose a thin-client system which addresses these problems: we introduce a realtime desktopstreamer using a videocodec to stream the graphical output of applications after GPU-processing to a thin-client device, capable of decoding a videostream. We compare this approach to a number of popular classic thin-client systems in terms of bandwidth, delay and image quality. The outcome is an architecture for a hybrid protocol, which can dynamically switch between a classic thin-client protocol and realtime desktopstreaming.